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Fall 2017

On “One-Star Reviews” and on #elit

When I first heard about the One-Star Reviews movement, I immediately began to think of bad things that I found merit in. This wasn’t a hard task — my favorite “getting to know someone” question is “what do your friends with ‘good taste’ hate that you like?” My answer is frozen vegetables straight from the bag.

So I began to make a list. I thought of chip crumbs and the kind of signature you get when your pen runs out of ink. The “buffering” symbol and mint flavored toothpicks. Finally I settled on something: these gloves that they sell in bins at Target. I began to write my post, constructing a persona that was a little bit like me but more so not. She was … more gregarious I’d say? I guess she’s still being built. But then I stopped — the words were flowing and I was having a blast, but I couldn’t finish; I still haven’t posted my response in the subreddit. Every day I think maybe I’ll do it, and then find an excuse to put it off a little longer as I read through new posts. I think maybe I’m saving it for a really rainy day because it’ll give me an excuse to do something creative. Since I began to understand the implications that starting on social media and the internet so early will have on the rest of my life (helllooooo Instagram addiction), I’ve been worried I’ve been losing creative parts of myself that are now taken up with scrolling through feeds and reading celebrity gossip as it happens. E-Lit has — and is — showing me a way to still hone my creativity while not sacrificing involvement in these platforms. I really cherish it. There’s also the possibility that I’m nervous to publish on a platform that I’m new to. I respect the authors and their creativity and am not quite sure how to jump in.

When I first read through the posts already uploaded on the One-Star Reviews subreddit I laughed, and I became a little more convinced of value in the often un-loveable. When someone next to me in class also started to laugh while reading the reviews and we began to chat about them I was even more convinced. Basically, we’re using the internet to find possibly-fake value in real life things. And that’s so neat.

We often utilize e-lit to tackle tough subjects traditional literature wouldn’t allow an ideal platform for (i.e. the problem with celebrity, filter bubbles, growing up on a computer), here I see it working in a new light for the first time, bringing people together in real time and making them (literally) laugh out loud.